---
title: "What Does Content Re-Use Look Like in a Web CMS?"
date: 2013-05-17
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/05/17/what-does-content-re-use-look-like-in-a-web-cms/
---
# What Does Content Re-Use Look Like in a Web CMS?
In this scenario, you have a lot of different information, much of it overlapping. For example, with your ACME widgets, you have some conceptual info, some strategic info, some configuration info, some management info, some API info, and some server info -- all related to the ACME widgets.

The sales people need the conceptual and strategic info but don't want to be burdened by the configuration, management, API, or server info.

The developers mostly need the API info and server info, though they do need some light familiarity with the conceptual info as well. They don't need the strategic info since the developers implement the spec from another team that formulates the strategy.

The administrators need the configuration and management info but not a whole lot of other info.

If you were working in a help authoring tool (HAT) or another model, you could create all your content as standalone topics and then produce three distinct outputs -- one for each audience. Your developer guide could include the API and server info while providing light conceptual topics as well. Your sales guide could walk through the conceptual and strategic components while omitting the more technical content of the other guides, and so on.

The model of distinct outputs for distinct audiences is a model many technical writers are familiar with. It works because the information sets are walled off from each other in clearly separable ways -- the help for the developer opens in its own web view and navigation. Search results are restricted to that web help file only.

But rather than publishing independent, standalone outputs, in this scenario you're using a web platform for all your help content. It would be odd to have multiple instances of the web platform. For example, you wouldn't have one Drupal instance for developers, one Drupal instance for salespeople, and one Drupal instance for administrators. You could technically do it, of course, but managing all those separate web platforms would be a headache. Instead, you have one web platform for all your content.

How do you re-use content intelligently on the same web CMS platform?

## Approach 1: Push the same topic out to different TOCs.

You could store the topics in a re-usable format outside the web platform and then push out the topics multiple times, sometimes including the topic in the information's table of contents (TOC) and sometimes not.